Study with us
Video clips (transcriptions)
Why study with us?
Camille O’Brien (Trinidad)
“I chose the University of London because it’s an internationally recognised university.”
Kishnan Ramroop (Trinidad)
“My degree being a University of London degree definitely helped me and give me the edge over
the others because, first of all, my employers were based in London. So they knew definitely what type
of degree it was and how good it was.”
Glynis Waldron (France)
“My work takes up a lot of my time and there are times when it’s extremely stressful. I
wanted to study in English – I live in Paris and there is no university in Paris where I could
do the programme in English, and the External System here is really ideal.”
Jeffrey Emberson (UK)
“I am self-employed, so that’s a further complication for me. I tend to work all sorts
of hours – evenings during the week or weekends – so it’s a bit of a juggling act.
There’s lots of work to do, and it’s really having a sympathetic family and wife. Lots
of things have to be put to one side because the studying comes first.”
Support for your studies
Camille O’Brien (Trinidad)
“I studied at a school here in Trinidad, SBCS. They provide excellent tuition; they also give
you the opportunity to voice your own opinion about the tuition, about the courses, about the lecturers.
They afford you the opportunity to be open.”
Glynis Waldron (France)
“I found the weekend courses extremely useful. The professors really helped to pull all the confusing
strands together, and you come away from the course thinking ‘Oh, it’s not so difficult
after all – I can make it, I can succeed.”
What is it like to be a student?
Hadi Jaafarawi (Saudi Arabia)
“The challenges that I faced – and I think every distance learner might face – is
to try and co-ordinate between his work, family and studies.”
Mukhtiar Singh (UK)
“They give you a lot of literature, it tells you how to work through it, and they give you study
guides. Really, if you just work through the study guides then you can structure it yourself. But it
is quite daunting when you get this huge box appear. You think ‘Oh, I want to try and study everything’.
But you’ve got to try and be realistic. You do have textbooks; they recommend other textbooks
for you to use. And then there’s institutions that support the programme and provide, at an additional
cost, other courses or classes, tuition etc.”
The online learning environment
Leo Kolbeinsson (Iceland)
“Distance learning implies that you’re more or less by yourself, and not in physical contact
with people, and the VLE is maybe the area where they pull us together. And, yes, it’s important
to have contact with the others. You can listen to the same lecture again and again, which someone
attending a university full time gets one shot at – but we can do it repeatedly. On the other
hand, the materials that came with the box – for example, the CD – with that I can access
the material even though I don’t have access to the internet.”